One of the blessings of serving at a church that allows me to focus my attention on developing a robust counseling ministry is the opportunity to create resources that can be duplicated in our church plants and churches across the country/world.
This year we were able to create three programmatic seminars and three topical seminars to equip the church to care for another and their community.
Programmatic Seminars
Overcoming Depression-Anxiety: A Suffering Paradigm
This seminar contains three hours of presentation divided into a nine step model of facing depression-anxiety when the experience is primarily a form of suffering. This seminar is most effective when studies with a friend our small group. This seminar is meant to be tandem resource with the responsibility paradigm seminar.
Overcoming Depression-Anxiety: A Responsibility Paradigm
This seminar contains three hours of presentation divided into a nine step model of facing depression-anxiety when the experience is rooted primarily in our beliefs, values, or behaviors. This seminar is most effective when studies with a friend our small group. This seminar is meant to be tandem resource with the suffering paradigm seminar.
Gospel-Centered Pre-Marital Mentoring Curriculum
We want this page to provide everything you need to provide every engaged couple in your church with a mentor couple who can walk them through a comprehensive pre-marital program. We also want to see the experienced marriages in your church enriched as they invest in engaged couples who are just beginning their marital journey.
Topical Seminars
Burnout
Burnout occurs when the things that once gave us life and energy become discouraging and draining instead, sacrificing our pleasures and accomplishments to the continual onslaught of “next.” While a common danger for Christians who dedicate their efforts to God’s kingdom, burnout eventually makes us choose cynical numbness over the “caring exhaustion” of Christian service. How do we avoid this pitfall? Brad Hambrick argues that burnout is actually a consequence of our life management, and he shows us how to create a time budget to avoid living beyond our means with the time God has provided. He helps us remember to rest in God’s fairness rather than trying to gain his acceptance.
10 Keys to Ensure Caring Is Helping
When we care for one another wisely three things should happen: (a) the person being cared for should be blessed, (b) the love of Christ should become more tangible, and (c) our faith should grow. Sometimes our attempts of caring can be done unwisely, resulting in unintended consequences: (a) the person being cared for is enabled, (b) the love of Christ is misrepresented, and (c) the care-giver becomes exhausted.
Towards a Christian Perspective on Mental Illness
When engaging a difficult and highly personal subject, it is better to start with good questions than a list of answers. The better our questions are, the more responsibly we will utilize the answers of which we are confidant, the more humbly we will approach areas of uncertainty, and the more we will honor one another in the process of learning.
Article
From Telling Your Story to Being Known
Often, as churches, we do a better job of teaching people how to tell their story than we do at preparing people for what it will be like to have their story known. We help people share their experience of God’s grace in a way that highlights the goodness of God and the power of the gospel. This is good and needed.
But we also need to help people (a) assess whether this is a wise time in their journey with God to share a particular aspect of their story, and (b) prepare for the kind of unique temptations that arise after sharing your story in a public setting. These two points become more important the larger the church or venue in which an individual is sharing their story becomes, because the dynamics in play become more pronounced as the audience gets larger.